The Tree Man Outside My Window

For two summers, a man who sang in a tree outside my Brooklyn apartment was a wacky bit of the neighborhood that stayed the same as new restaurants and wine shops continued sprouting up.

Illustration by Pieter Van Eenoge

There is a scraggly tree outside my apartment, in Brooklyn, with branches directly level to my bedroom window. For the past two summers, I’ve occasionally woken up or fallen asleep to the sounds of a man who nimbly scales it, finds a sturdy branch to nestle into, takes out a small notebook and a spliff, and sings. Or, more accurately, bellows. He has a clumsy, sweaty voice, almost intentionally atonal, with a slanted Caribbean accent that I can’t quite place. His songs are part theology, part sociology, about things he sees and hears and things he wants our street to know about, weaving in absurdist pseudo-Christian psalms and current pop-culture references. Whenever a passerby engages with him, he’ll say that the tree taught him the songs, that it spoke to him, and that he is protecting it.

The first time I noticed Tree Man, not long after moving into my apartment, last summer, he was a weird and funny nuisance—I snapped some videos for Instagram, stared at him and listened for a few moments, then closed my window and drifted back into my afternoon nap. But when he kept returning, I came to count on him. I grew up a few blocks away, but I couldn’t guess whether he’d been climbing the tree for years or if he’d shown up the week before I’d arrived. Maybe he was enticed by the growing audience in a neighborhood that was rapidly attracting new residents. He certainly enjoyed the attention: Who climbs a tree and sings without being a bit of a narcissist? Still, I decided he was cool, with a ragged but considered personal style, and a pretty sweet orange bike. He was strange but harmless, and he wasn’t causing any trouble beyond ruining a nap or two. Other people on the busy street seemed to feel the same way. Tree Man’s concerts continued unabated through August, and then he disappeared into the fall.

This past June, when Tree Man returned for the first time, it was a small event, attended only by my roommate and me. His comeback signalled the start of the new season, a wacky bit of our neighborhood that had stayed the same as new restaurants and wine shops continued sprouting up by the day. During a late night of writing, his harmonies became a solid checkpoint, an excuse to push ahead for another hour or so. When I described him to friends and visitors, they’d often bring up “Hey Arnold,” the nineties Nickelodeon cartoon about a group of fourth-grade kids encountering figures of urban legend: Pigeon Man, Stoop Kid, Monkeyman, and the ilk. I considered that the series, which took place in the fictional metropolis of Hillwood City, might have been attempting to humanize local vagabonds like Tree Man for the show’s TV-Y7 viewers. These were people, too, Arnold and his friends would always discover by the episode’s end, with dense backstories and reasons for living in the ways they’d chosen.

I don’t remember very many police officers in “Hey Arnold.” If they had been there, they might’ve driven Pigeon Man’s makeshift coop off of his roof, charging him with trespassing, or ticketed Stoop Kid for loitering, or arrested Monkeyman for disturbing the peace with his patented shrieks. A few weeks into this summer, a police officer spotted Tree Man in his tree. He’d been there for about an hour, late at night. My roommate came out into the living room and asked me to turn down Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl” music video, assuming it was the TV that had woken him. Instead, we heard Tree Man shouting, and poked our heads out the window to find him arguing with a cop. Soon, the officer called in backup: the street was blocked off by two squad cars, and ambulances approached. Some kids hanging out in front of the building across the street stood at attention. Tree Man, emboldened by the officers’ presence, climbed higher and sang out extra loud.

“Who are you?” one cop asked him.

“Me? You don’t know me? I’m History, I’m all of you,” Tree Man replied. They ordered him to come down, and he refused. They said that he was going to hurt himself, and he replied, “You don’t know this tree, I know this tree. You have to come up and get me, and you can’t.” He was right: the tree was tough to climb without practice, and the cops didn’t seem eager to attempt it. “Stop shining that light in my face,” Tree Man said. “Why are you trying to make me fall?”

“We’re shining the light so that we can see you,” the cop replied.

“Am I that black that you can’t see me? I’m in a tree,” Tree Man said. “You’re that stupid?”

Sensing the energy shifting, I felt the need to defend him. “He’s only staying up there ’cause you guys are here,” I said from my window. “If you left, he’d come down when he was finished.”

“Yeah, but we’ve got to do our jobs,” one cop replied. He couldn’t see me from his curbside vantage. “He’s always up there?” he asked upward, in my direction.

“Every week.”

After a few hours of the standoff, lit by red and blue lights, a large N.Y.P.D. truck arrived, and officers dragged out and inflated two large mats, which they laid around the tree’s base. The police again prodded Tree Man to dismount, and again Tree Man refused. Many officers stood by and watched, unsure how seriously they should be taking the whole ordeal—one grabbed a rake and swept up fallen branches. A truck equipped with a cherry picker soon arrived, and an officer donned a helmet and climbed in it. Sensing defeat, Tree Man climbed down, landed on the mat, and surrendered, as seven officers swarmed him and placed him on a stretcher. He continued to sing as they wheeled him off.

I figured that this was the end of Tree Man’s residency on my block. But, a few weeks later, he was back again, and a few hours later officers had surrounded his tree once more, this time a bit more ticked off at what they considered a repeat offense—“Aw, he’s in the tree again?” Reinforcements soon returned. Sympathetic onlookers asked what law Tree Man was breaking.

“Daniel, let’s go!” an officer shouted from the center of the blocked-off street.

“Who am I-I-I-I-I?” Tree Man sang, over and over, tauntingly. “Who are you-u-u-u. Who you are is not of my concern, I praise the Lord. I’m not Daniel.” The officer asked what his name was. “Who am I-I-I-I-I. That’s what I’m concerned with! Who am I? Just a child in a tree. You will know that it’s the tree who has a name, not I.”

“Daniel, show’s over, everybody’s gone, come on,” the cop said.

“Not everybody’s gone, because I’m still here. I got worms to save, and ants, and caterpillars. So fuck you.”

“If you come down, we’ll go get you some food.”

“I eat mosquitoes for breakfast, by the thousands.”

Eventually, the cherry-picker truck arrived once again.

“You know what’s funny?” Tree Man shouted, as he climbed higher than I’d ever seen him go. “Nothing’s funny. You’re serious. Why so serious? You’re serious about this? You don’t want me in this tree?” He laughed. “Warriors, come out and play! I shot the sheriff!”

A new officer, who seemed particularly confident with the cherry-picker, strapped on a helmet, stepped into the compartment, and directed an operator, who lifted him as close to Tree Man as possible. He sprayed Tree Man with a hose; in retaliation, Tree Man pulled his pants down and urinated toward the officer. The officer alternated between orders and pleas, his cherry-picker crawling more slowly than Tree Man could climb.

Eventually, Tree Man lost his footing and dropped a few feet down, within the cherry picker’s reach. He and the officer tussled, mid-tree, as the officer tried to swing him off balance, down onto the mat. Tree Man batted him away diligently. The standoff lasted about twenty minutes, alternately surreal, enraging, and hilarious: a physical confrontation between an unarmed civilian and an officer, this time eleven feet above the ground.

You know what they say about things that go up. Once Tree Man hit the mat, the officers swarmed him, cuffed him, and took him away. One officer then used a chainsaw to hack off the lowest branches of the tree, to prevent Tree Man from climbing again. But, a few weeks later, he was back, and he has appeared outside my window several times since. I haven’t witnessed his ascent, and I’m not sure how he manages to scale several feet of straight bark. But the tree hasn’t failed him yet. He still sings: later in the night or earlier in the morning than he used to, but just as loudly, and comfortingly out of tune.

One morning last week, as I walked to the corner store to buy a stamp, I saw Tree Man riding down the avenue on his bike. It was odd to see him in the daylight, obeying the laws of gravity. He said good morning to people as he rode by, mostly to women. He didn’t say good morning to me. I considered saying hello, shaking his hand, telling him that he was the man. I figured I should cherish spotting him around the block while I could. I think he knows his days are numbered as well, not that that’s a reason to stop climbing. I watched him as he biked past, pedalling on down the street and into a nearby park. There are plenty of other trees that need protecting.